


Lifted

by SavageInkSpillage



Category: The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
Genre: AU, Gen, Hurt!Gustave, Hurt/Comfort, Philosophical whinging
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-19
Updated: 2015-08-19
Packaged: 2018-04-15 15:39:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4612188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SavageInkSpillage/pseuds/SavageInkSpillage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ever since I saw the film, my mind has been busy engineering a universe in which Gustave did get shot but failed to die. The actual action of getting shot is not featured because the film itself never quite explained why Zero and Agatha escaped relatively unscathed when it was originally Zero they were after, so... this is all that follows. It starts with the proverbial life flashing before dying eyes, and from there it meanders through philosophical observations, hopeless despair and offensive lorry driving.</p>
<p>Enjoy!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lifted

When Monsieur Gustave was but a boy, he and his parents lived in a miners village in a cold and windswept place. Its houses seemed to have grown out of the unforgiving granite cliffs they leant against, and its people blackened and tough, like the coal that rose up from the mines each and every day, and the pillars of smoke that seemed to surround the entire horizon. He, like most of the other children, had thought them to be walls. His parents said that if these were walls, he should be thankful to be so well guarded. They did not say what against. No adult ever did. Still, he knew that before his family settled in the soot stained little hamlet they called home, there had been a different place. He was younger then, of course, and could now recall only fleeting increments of it.

Warmth, sunlight, laughter. Bare feet in something that might have been sand, but could just as easily have been grass, or water, or even just a cold cobble stone path. He remembered, as that lanky little boy who stared idly at his guardians of smoke and imagined them jousting for dominance, how utterly and completely defined places could be by the way light touched them. This, he remembered, had been a place of magical light, under which beauty would never come to spoil, and the sun continued to kiss your skin even after it had set.

Then, tears, running, screaming. The toddler he was not understanding why he was afraid, only that it was wholly and entirely the case.  

They left, never to return.

Many times in his further life, he came to doubt whether places of such splendour even existed on this mortal plane. He concluded that they could not have, but every time he wanted to inquire after the coordinates of one such locale, the past rose up and came to lie heavily upon his parents’ eyes like a putrid scab. He never dared peel it off, even though he yearned to for many years. Still, they were happy.

Little Hugo Gustave attended the village school and learned eagerly, in no way different from the other kids. He befriended a modest amount and allowed himself to be coaxed into playing kickball with the others in the only square their village counted. Though, it must be added; he did not fair well. Still, he gained a certain amount of credit among his peers by nailing the sternfaced statue that guarded the barely-there square right between the eyes on one occasion. Something had flown into his eye, and thus the entire exercise was completed while his eyes were still closed, and was, of course, a complete accident. Not that he’d ever admit to it himself, mind you.

Then, after the game was finished and each grime coated urchin made their way home, he would start boiling pails of water. The distinctive tread of his parents would alert him to their impending presence, and he would hastily stuff the book he was reading between the sofa cushions, fix his hair, wipe the dirt from his cheeks and he would answer the door with his chin held high. Mother would roll her eyes, then kiss him regardless, and father’s hand, the one with fewer fingers than it should have, would come to rest upon his shoulders. He led them to their bath, steaming and just the right temperature after a day down the mines, and would courtesy, and then leave. They would part-take of this bath together... the idea of this grew less offensive to him as time wore on. Then, he would take a bath of his own, after mother dried her hair and tied it in braids so elaborate they seemed to frighten his father and cause him to grow weary of poking at his stomach in front of the mirror. Hugo watched, when he shouldn’t have, and loved them immensely throughout.

His own bath would always be less full, and tepid, and charcoal dust floated between his fingers, but he learned to be satisfied, and to feel clean even when this was not the case.

“Cleanliness,” his father would say, reverently as he said anything, “is but a state of mind.” Still, father favoured the kind of soap that would sterilize a hog after a single drop.

The years progressed even behind the walls of smoke, and books and haircuts and baths varied, but in essence the ritual remained the same.

Now on the very cusp of adulthood, Hugo Gustave had grown hardy and strong, of clear eyes and even clearer diction. He held a job in the village as a teacher, and happily taught the new crop of young ones about the majesty of language and history and art.

The lesson concluded at some indiscriminate hour on the one day he could remember more clearly than any other, and somehow, even now, the image of wee Josephine Marigold seems clear as day; she had been appointed to be his helper, and carried a stack of books almost her size to the appropriate cabinet with all the pride in the world.

He gave praise as eagerly and sincerely as he always had, and then walked home. He still can’t remember whether he sang on the way there. Sometimes he thinks so, but the words of the song have long since died on his lips and he cannot hope to discover the truth now. He is, however, entirely certain that a small collection of his parents’ coworkers had amassed upon the porch when he arrived there, and that only one of them was brave enough to tell him that there had been a cave in, and that his parents were now dead. Others died as well, but just as he does not know whether or not he sang on the way to the end of his life as he knew it, he now cannot decide whether he was ashamed to find that the others didn’t matter to him. At least, not then.

It was a cold and desperate moment of time, in which he fell to the unyielding stone and could not cry for all that would claw its way out of his chest if he did. He remembers just... just sitting there. Not yet a man, but not enough of a child to expect to be taken in by anyone else. The light changed while he sat, eyes vacant and hands trembling, and by the time he’d scraped together enough fortitude to stand up, night had descended upon the world. He packed his bags, knowing that the mining company would not risk retrieving his parents’ bodies out of a structure that had been thoroughly proven to be unstable, and walked away.

He carried the only depiction of his parents he could find within a pocket of his warmest jeans, their names Jean-Baptiste and Remi seemly lit on the front of it. He carried also, a letter of resignation within his coat, with a message for the class, and then each individual child, scribbled shakily but lovingly upon the paper.

He kept walking, through the night, amid dubious birdcalls and various insects and glowing eyes in the darkness, rustling bushes, and cattle staring curiously at him as he passed.

When morning came, he turned back once.

The walls of smoke were now far behind him, his only true home increasingly obscured by clouds. They seemed, to him, to resemble a dropping curtain; drawing this era of his life to a close. He couldn’t stand to watch it for long, and continued walking.

 

* * *

 

 

So, of course, decades pass and now he finds himself on his back in a train carriage... and fully dressed, at that.  
And he’s watching fucking clouds again. He knows that something terrible has just happened. Something with a greatly echoic bang and a hurt that bit into the core of him, but now seems content to nibble at the edges of his frayed flesh. He barely feels it anymore. He was hot, then cold, then colder still, and now he lies numb.

He lies numb, and still, and looks at the fucking clouds. A tacky addition to the first class car’s ceilings, if you ask him. A vaguely neo-classicist shamble of mute lighting and an assortment of both degenerates from the Greek pantheon and angelic little cherubs floating around on yet more clouds.   
He remembers, not long ago, being very afraid. But then, Agatha’s horrified outcry filled the cabin, and he remembers her petticoats were bunched so tightly in her hands as she ran past that he feared her knuckles would split. On her heels, he saw only a familiar pair of shoes. He’d picked them up himself, on the wearer’s wedding day. Gave the crippled shoe shine boy his best ever pay for a job well done.

If they are alive, he is not scared. He decides now, after several decades, that he cannot have felt ashamed that the lives of others mattered less to him than those of his beloved parents: if he had, he would not have let himself feel this relieved when the fate of any other passenger on the train remained a mystery. But he does.

He can feel the moment passing, and knows that the agony he has managed to abstain from will be held off no longer. Very quickly, he wonders why it was necessary to inflict such a cultural atrocity on innocent eyes, and whether it would not have been more efficient to introduce the passengers to the much cheaper, and altogether novel idea of Looking Out of the Goddamned Window. Fucking clouds.

He does not want the curtain to drop yet...

 

Not yet.

 

* * *

 

 

Something crashes over him, and suddenly he knows that the train has emptied into the narrow hallway, and he hears the low hum of hushed conversation, and the lingering warmth of too many people in too small a space. Boots step heavily down to the back of the train, and from there the sound dissipates until he only hears himself gasping. Blindly, afraid, he grasps for purchase and finds a fistful of cloth.

Were he to look up, he’d see a man. A man who did not make his way here with the intention to get involved in anything at all, and is rather devastated to find he now is. He is a salesman who prefers to think of himself as a merchant; he sells fine shoes to fine men and exquisite women. About medicine, he knows nothing. About counsel for the dying, even less. Bloody fingers hold his pant leg in a vice, and he waits.

“Sir... I’m sorry. I’m sorry, sir. I cannot help you... I... I’m not equipped to... I sell shoes!”

Waiting, it seems, would have been the better strategy. There are spectators, Gustave now knows. Stood just a few paces away, inactive at first. Now, there is active disgust in the air. The air, yes: he does not see their faces, but there is something heavy and disapproving floating about the train. Does the salesman sense it? Or is it just some spectre beyond the veil reaching out to him, and only him? And only because he is dying?

God... it seems absurd to him now, the extent to which he contemplated the wallpaper. Because he is genuinely dying, and an uncouth shoe salesman won’t effect this at all. Gustave’s bloodless fingers unwind from the cloth they hold, and the man is freed. He speeds recklessly down the train, crowd parting parting for him like the sea did for Mozes. His bloody footprints are all that remain, and the crowd dares not merge back into itself.

Part hygiene, part absolute numbing fear... Gustave doesn’t blame them.

Then, Zero and Agatha come through the narrow blood print lane, placing their feet over the ugly stains until they reach the side of their beloved friend.

Zero kneels; Agatha sits back on her haunches: A nosebleed encroaches upon Zero’s improvised moustache, and Agatha’s eyes are swollen and puffy, and yet there’s an anger in there the fascists themselves cannot hope to match.

They are scared, and bloodied, and really fucking angry, but they are, blessedly, alright.

Alright.

“Thank God...” that is what Gustave intended to say, anyway... he doesn’t quite make it there, but his hand makes it into Zero’s and Agatha’s hands make it over the bullet hole and into his hair and then back again, so he accepts the loss. When she comes to press down upon his flesh, he sputters something meant to be scathing that’s turned out to be mostly blood.

“Oh... we’ll get you help Monsieur Gustave, we’ll find help... we’ll... I promise.” Zero stutters, and promises. There’s a lesson there about making only the promises you know you can keep, but the words sound soothing and kind and Gustave doesn’t want to get into it at this particular moment in time. He doesn’t.

Just lays there, and suffers, and wonders whether the end of a life is something you experience; maybe a kindly host from the other side will arrive and offer his emotional baggage to a bellhop, and they’ll step into the elevator and just keep going up and up and up... into the clouds.

 

* * *

 

 

It happened so quickly Zero can’t really say what happened. He sees only the result, and tries his best to keep the blood of his mentor inside of him where it belongs. Tries, being the operative word. Agatha is many a time more succesful at this than he is, and it occurs to him briefly that people covered in blood shouldn’t be so Goddamned beautiful, but she snaps at him for staring and then he’s back on task.

Other commuters come and offer up every handkerchief and scarf and item of clothing they can stand to spare. The items lay in a little pile, next to them, and get dillegently used. Monsieur Gustave has long since lost consciousness, and Zero has long since started to cry.

“I... Agatha... he’s dying, isn’t he? We need... Oh God...”

“Zero! Zero, love, please listen to me. We can’t fecking do this now, alright? He needs us! You know he does!”

“But he saved me! He saved me and I can’t save him! What the fuck are we going to do!?”

“Keep going. That’s what.” Agatha doesn’t take part in the hysterics that Zero finds himself in, she just keeps going; Mexico lays on her cheek, flooded with crimson, and she just keeps going.

“No! It’s not working! We’re just hurting him whilst he dies!”

Her husband is screaming at her, and Monsieur Gustave seems trapped in a delirium of sorts, and yet she just keeps going. “Zero, we’ve got nothin’ else to try, do we?”

“NO! He’s -” the slap resounds so loudly you’d think she’s slapped the train itself off the damned tracks, but it hasn’t budged and the fucking barley still sways in front of the windows.

"Thank you..."

It dawns on Zero, then, what they’ll have to do:

How does one come by front row isle seats for a first night of the opera Toscana with one day’s notice?

How does one arrange a private viewing of the tapestry collection at the Royal Saxon Gallery?

How does one secure a corner table at Chez Dominique on a Thursday?

“I’m sorry. I am. I know what we’ve got to do, but you’ve got to stay here and look after him. I need to go make a phone call, alright?” Zero isn’t calm, but he is calmer and he is determined.

They confer, they kiss, and then Zero steps out and she remains at Gustave’s side with several aides plucked out of the crowd.

The conductors have agreed to leave the train here, until Monsieur Gustave can be evacuated properly. Partly because they feel awful, and partly because if they continued on a man would lose his life right under their eyes and on their watch... surely they’d be fired?

“How long?” asks Agatha. Several larger individuals have taken over the care for her dear friend, gripping his mauled chest with hands the size of a spade.

“As long as it takes, I suppose.” the head-conductor is a kindly older man with a shock of white hair underneath his nose and a far less impressive measure left on his actual head. He was going to retire to a farm soon, play with his darling grandkids and all that. Now there’s fascism and searches and dying men on his train. Disappointing, really.

“Thank you, sir... we’ll try our best to be quick about it.” because they’ll have to be.

“I’ll bet...” lightly, his hand touches her shoulder.

 

* * *

 

 

Zero runs faster than he ever has, winding his way through the thick clusters of grain around him and navigating his way into town by the odd signpost pointing toward a telephone box.

“I’ll do this... I’ll do this...” the words form under his breath, over and over and over again like a frantic chant.

Finally, two miles out, he finds the damned thing.

“M. Ivan?” comes the voice through the receiver. Like salvation itself.

Suddenly Zero’s crying and he cannot seem to stop.

“M. Gustave got shot... he needs help. We’re on a train a few miles out of Nebelsbad, and...”

“Okay, Zero. Okay. Tell me exactly where you are, tell me what you need, and we’ll come.” his tone is grim, and it remains so after Zero has relayed the situation to him.

He calls M. George, and M. George cannot come but he ransacks his archives for the number of the doctor he once knew on the outskirts of Nebelsbad, because said doctor still owes him a debt.

M. Dino is quite a lot closer than M. George and used to be a medic in a great war that knows no name and is only remembered by its veterans. He agrees, rather immediately, to come.

He calls M. Robin, who laments that he cannot come quickly enough but pledges that every medical implement found in his hotel will be packed up and dedicated to the continuing survival of his dear friend Gustave. There is no doubt in his words, and it is clear that M. Martin, whom he then calls, shares it wholeheartedly.

The conversation itself is a masterpiece of brevity and practicality. It last not 5 minutes, and by the time it reaches its natural end, M. Ivan is making his way steadily toward Zero in the same town car he’d shared with Gustave some months earlier, M. Dino has somehow managed to commandeer a lorry, which they’ll use to transport their esteemed colleague with minimal bother, and he has, for assistance, damned near every doctor, nurse and God-forsaken dentist in the entirety of Zubrowka crammed in the back of it. They huddle among bags holding the amassed treasures from all the hotels the members of the society of the crossed keys: enough laudanum and morphia to bring a herd of elephants to their knees, enough scalpels and stethoscopes and trays to fully stock all the fascist-overtaken hospitals from here to the outskirts of rural Sweden and back again, and enough bandages and cotton to wrap not only Gustave from head to toe, but also the lorry and possibly even the train on which he still lies.

He is still, to each of them at least, suspended in a half-state between dead and alive like Shrödinger's unfortunate feline. They unite easily and quickly in joint terror, and it is only a further hour that Zero has to spend alone on the side of a dirt road, sat hunched and low against the glass door of the box from whence he has attempted the heroism he so admires in his mentor.

He sees it, the lorry. First, it occurs to him that it must be some cruel vision trick of sorts, but it steadily approaches.

From behind it, M. Ivan’s sporty towncar emerges and quickly overtakes the gigantic beige monstrosity. The doors are open before the car has fully stopped, and Zero gets in swiftly.

No words pass between them, except when Zero’s help is required navigating their convoy to the train.

It weighs heavily on all of them that they might be entirely too late, so Zero prefers to spend most of the ride craning his neck back at the lorry; several of the doctors and nurses got tired of being crammed into the vehicle like sardines in a tin, and have instead mounted the steel canopy that covers their brethren. They ride atop the roof, like Gods atop shrines and great heroes atop pedestals, and Zero loves them. They wave at him, salute him, and they are the clearest vectors of hope he is allowed, and Zero loves them.

M. Ivan’s hands are shaking, and he asks a great many questions about Gustave, and produces from a small bag in his lap a good sized vial of l’air de panache, and Zero loves him, too.

He is hope... they are hope.

The fascists might think themselves powerful, they might meddle arrogantly with the affairs of the greater universe, but they cannot manage this: they cannot make armies of medical men and women coalesce under the threat of their demise, they cannot inspire the loyalty required for almost 40 men and women of different kin and country to follow along without complaint, and they cannot make them ride like they now do, like the hunted against the fall of night and the wind and snow and cold.

They might think themselves powerful, but they’re just playing at it.

 

**Author's Note:**

> To be continued, of course!
> 
> First fanfic after a dry spell of a couple of years, so... I'll take what you can give me!


End file.
